Object of the Day

This nightcap, dating from the late 17th or early 18th century, was made using a technique called crewel, a type of embroidery worked with wool yarn on linen. Since men had shaved heads or very short hair to accommodate their wigs during this period, they wore caps like this one to keep warm after their...

Floral wallpapers constitute probably the largest grouping of wallpapers in the Cooper Hewitt collection. Floral designs have always been in fashion since the early days of wallpaper, and appear in every style from neo-classical, to art deco to pop art. Floral designs have also been produced in every printing technique used to produce wallpapers, from...

This vase was designed and made by Hilda Jesser. Jesser attended the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in Vienna from 1914 until 1917 where she took classes with members of the Wiener Werkstätte whom she designed for from 1916 to 1921. During her time as a student at the Kunstgewerbeschule she primarily focused on fashion...

This Soviet era trade catalog for toys was intended for non-Russian audiences, and was produced by the Raznoexport Company in Moscow. This firm sold all sorts of consumer goods of Russian manufacture for export; the text is in English and French. Textiles, rugs, tobacco, bicycles, cut glass, and building materials among other goods were marketed...

More than 44 million people attended the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and two of the many exhibits that visitors would have enjoyed were the Glass Center, a pavilion that marketed glass as the material of the future, and the Town of Tomorrow, a faux suburb of model homes that included the House of...

This striped wallpaper is one pattern from a group of seven which form Irma Boom’s Colour-Based on Nature collection. Working from photographs of UNESCO/World Heritage Sites around the globe, Boom has translated each of the landscapes into a digital color diagram. The diagrams were then translated into striped wallpaper patterns and specially mixed colors were...

A carnet de bal, or dance card, was a fashionable accessory often carried by women attending a formal dance to record the names of the gentlemen with whom she would dance over the course of the evening. Occasionally, the carnet de bal would be executed as a fan, allowing a lady to write down her...

The postwar design era focused largely on improving all aspects of life at home for those who had maintained it during the war and those who were just returning. The remodeled electric iron was one among many postwar innovations, but this Silver Streak iron in particular epitomizes the design period. The Silver Streak’s aerodynamic form...

The CDC acknowledged the first cases of what is now accepted to be HIV on June 5, 1981 in a “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” (MMWR), which documented instances of a rare lung infection known as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) in five young, previously healthy gay men. The virus swiftly spread, and by 1989 the...